How Quantum Theory Can Help Understanding Natural Language

In the Quantum Group, we contribute to the field of natural language processing by using methods from mathematics and quantum theory to show how information flows between words in a sentence to give us the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

This video, intended for laymen, gives a brief introduction to our basic techniques: how we represent word meanings and how we then combine these word meanings to give the meaning of a sentence. People use language in very creative ways, like in metaphors or word play in sentences such as "Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana", sometimes without even realising it. By explaining our view on language and meaning, I hope to inspire people to think about theirs.

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Podcasts from the University of Oxford Department of Computer Science, one of the longest-established Computer Science departments in the country. Formerly known as the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, it is home to a community of world-class research and teaching. Research activities encompass core Computer Science, as well as computational biology, quantum computing, computational linguistics, information systems, software verification and software engineering. The department is...